In the wake of the loss of the Cambridge Whistleblowing Tribunal, and with the Grace impending, the University of Cambridge has announced the membership of the committee tasked with examining its human resources (HR) processes.

The committee is chaired by Laura Whyte, with Cindy Butts, Mary Curnock Cook, Helen Fairfoul and Colin Riordan as members. We take a critical look at their records.

Laura Whyte

Laura Whyte is a senior HR and governance professional. She spent a decade on the John Lewis Management Board, initially as Registrar and subsequently as HR Director. As Registrar, her role was intended to provide the Board with an objective assessment of whether employees were appropriately supported and whether their views were being reflected in decision-making.

She is the author of HMRC’s 2019 Respect at Work review. It was commissioned specifically to examine the gap between HMRC’s stated values and employées’ experience.

“My report has sought to assess the gap between HMRC’s stated ambitions and the reality on the ground. I’ve identified a range of areas for HMRC to consider taking action, and I know from my conversations with HMRC’s leadership that they are committed to addressing this issue” (Laura Whyte)

This is plainly relevant to the matter in hand. Whyte examined the culture and systems of HMRC and found serious problems: employees lacked confidence in the grievance process and what the report called “low level poor behaviour” had become normalised. Her approach was reformist rather than adversarial. Her recommendations emphasised behavioural standards, better processes, mediation, reasonable adjustments, data and leadership responsibility. HMRC accepted all the recommendations.

HMRC subsequently introduced behavioural commitments and revised policies, but the existence of implementation activity doesn’t by itself establish that the underlying cultural problems were solved. HMRC’s subsequent annual reporting records the implementation, but not an independent assessment of their long-term effectiveness or a demonstration that the cultural problems identified by Whyte were successfully overcome.

She has spent much of her career operating within, and helping to govern, large organisations. There is an important distinction between repairing an organisation from within and holding an institution to account from outside it. The former focuses on improving processes, behaviour and governance; the latter requires asking more fundamental questions about power, responsibility, incentives and whether the institution’s own structures contributed to the problem.

Cindy Butts

Cindy Butts has worked in policing, criminal justice and public life, including at the Independent Police Complaints Commission. She chaired the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC). She was appointed Standing Advocate for the Independent Public Advocate in 2025 following parliamentary pre-appointment scrutiny.

ICEC examined racism, sexism, class discrimination and other forms of inequality throughout English and Welsh cricket. Its 2023 report concluded that discrimination was widespread and made 44 recommendations, including an unreserved apology from the ECB, as reported here by the BBC. The scale and nature of the findings demonstrated that Butts was prepared to subject a major institution to searching scrutiny, rather than confining the exercise to questions of individual behaviour or procedural compliance.

Butts was not afraid to be very critical of the institution that commissioned her review. She subsequently criticised the ECB over its failure to make the county talent pathway entirely free and publicly expressed disappointment when the ECB did not challenge Lord Botham’s attack on the ICEC report. These interventions are significant because they occurred after the principal report had been delivered and demonstrate a willingness to maintain public pressure on the institution that had commissioned the work.

The ICEC itself was established by the ECB. The commission therefore operated within an institutional structure in which the body ultimately responsible for the sport had commissioned the scrutiny of itself. Implementation ultimately depended upon the same institution that had been investigated. The subsequent parliamentary scrutiny of cricket illustrates how difficult it is to convert recommendations into structural change.

Butts’ background means she is strongly oriented towards victims, inequality, institutional accountability and public-interest advocacy. Of the five, she has the clearest demonstrated record of telling a commissioning institution things that it did not necessarily want to hear.

Independence is not simply a matter of whether an investigator is formally external to an organisation. It also concerns the intellectual and professional standpoint from which the organisation is examined. So, we are particularly impressed by the fact that Butts continued to challenge the commissioning institution publicly when she considered aspects of its response inadequate.

Mary Curnock Cook

Mary Curnock Cook is an independent education expert and former UCAS Chief Executive. She has held extensive non-executive positions across higher education, qualifications and education policy. Her career is deeply connected to the higher-education establishment.

She was UCAS Chief Executive from 2010–17 and has subsequently accumulated a portfolio of governance roles. She is currently a member of the University of Leicester Council and chairs its Audit and Assurance Committee; she also has roles connected with Pearson and many other education organisations.

She is clearly knowledgeable about the Higher Education sector. This raises an obvious question for a supposedly independent university review — how far can someone embedded in the governance networks of higher education provide any independent perspective?

There is an interesting episode from her UCAS career. Curnock Cook was a prominent critic of the practice of schools inflating predicted grades. Later, the issue of predicted grades became controversial when the Guardian exposed a policy at Sevenoaks School encouraging teachers to increase predictions for some students. In response to the revelation, Mary Curnock Cook noted that while it is understandable for schools to present their students in the most optimistic light, it was “embarrassing for Sevenoaks that deliberately overpredicting students’ grades is in writing in their guidelines“. In 2015, she also criticised independent schools for encouraging students into predictable elite career paths and argued that some private-school pupils were receiving a narrow educational experience, as noted here.

Her present activities are heavily concentrated in higher-education governance. She has the deepest network of the five within the education establishment: the government’s biography currently lists her as Chair of Dyson Institute and Pearson Education Ltd, NED of the London Interdisciplinary School and The Student Room, trustee of HEPI, and chair of an HE ed-tech group, in addition to her earlier UCAS career. She sits on the University of Leicester Council, which is ultimately responsible for the institution’s strategic direction and ensuring that its systems and procedures are fit for purpose. There have been many criticisms of the recent direction of the University of Leicester, especially with regard to its lacks of support for arts and humanities.

She’s an insider with considerable knowledge of how universities operate, but not a natural advocate for the perspective of staff challenging university management.

Helen Fairfoul

Helen Fairfoul was Chief Executive of the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) from 2012–20. UCEA represents university employers in collective bargaining with trade unions. She subsequently became a governor at Northumbria University and a member of its Remuneration Committee.

UCEA is not a neutral body. It represents university employers in employment negotiations. That means that during a substantial period of her career, she was one of the most senior figures on the employers’ side of UK higher-education industrial relations.

During the major UCU disputes over pay, pensions, workload and casualisation, Fairfoul publicly represented the employers’ position. In 2019, UCU wrote directly to her as UCEA chief executive, arguing that UCEA’s proposals failed to address workload, precarious employment and gender pay gaps.

She also defended the use of casual and zero-hours arrangements in higher education. In evidence to Parliament, she argued that universities would generally need a casual element to their workforce and that zero-hours frameworks could be suitable in some circumstances.

UCEA’s position during the industrial disputes was explicitly that of the university employers. In 2019, Fairfoul was a signatory to an open letter from UCEA and Universities UK arguing that meeting UCU’s demands would divert unsustainable amounts of money from other university priorities. In January 2020, as industrial action continued, she defended the employers’ proposals, saying that UCEA had gone further than previously in putting forward sector-wide proposals.

Her professional identity is built around representing and advising university employers on employment relations. She is an unusual choice for a panel examining an institution in which staff may have allegations concerning employment practices, governance or culture.

Her current role at Northumbria University makes this even more controversial. She chairs its Finance and Resources Committee, a body with responsibility for significant institutional financial matters. There is a potential concern created by Fairfoul’s previous role representing university employers and her present university governance position. There has already been public criticism from university trade-union representatives of this combination of roles.

We regard Fairfoul as a poor choice for the panel. Her career has been unusually closely aligned with the interests of university employers. We doubt whether she can provide an independent perspective where the interests and experiences of university staff are central to the issues under examination.

Colin Riordan

Colin Riordan knows universities from the perspective of the Vice Chancellor and senior management. He was Vice-Chancellor of Cardiff University from 2012–23 and previously Vice-Chancellor of Essex. He has extensive sector-level governance experience and is now Secretary General and CEO of the Association of Commonwealth Universities.

His Cardiff tenure included major industrial disputes over pay and pensions. In early 2020, Cardiff University was in an industrial dispute with unions, with approximately 800 employees involved in strike action at the end of 2019. 

Cardiff UCU was openly critical of Riordan’s position during the USS dispute, asking him to use his influence within Universities UK to support an enhanced offer to staff. 

There was also a significant dispute over senior pay. Cardiff UCU reported in 2019 that Riordan attended the remuneration body that set his pay, although he was not himself a member of the remuneration committee. The union criticised his reported £298,000 remuneration package in 2018 against the background of job reductions and staff disputes. 

Cardiff University is now in considerable financial crisis, as we have reported earlier. Most of the criticism has been directed towards the current Vice Chancellor, Wendy Larner, but most of the poor financial decisions were actually taken under her predecessor, Colin Riordan.

We therefore regard this as a very poor appointment. Riordan’s career has been overwhelmingly situated on the senior-management side of university power. His experience may give him extensive knowledge of how universities are run. However, he is closely associated with some of the most damaging aspects of University management over the last decades.

Overall Assessment

This committee is seriously unbalanced.

Many of its members are university management insiders.They may be independent of the organisation commissioning the review in the narrow sense, but several are deeply embedded in the institutional world being reviewed. This is particularly true of Curnock Cook, Fairfoul and Riordan. Their natural empathy is likely to be with the difficulties of running a large organisation with many staff, and with the management problems created by disputes involving those staff. Only Butts brings a particularly strong track record of challenging institutions from the outside.

Given the investigation was prompted by a damaging Employment Tribunal loss, the absence of an employment lawyer is absolutely astonishing.

There is also no obvious member whose principal career has been as a trade union official, an academic, a whistleblower or investigator specialising in institutional retaliation, a student representative; an independent journalist/investigative researcher specialising in universities; or an independent academic specialising in organisational abuse, institutional culture or power.

We would put the following question to Laura Whyte as chair:

Why does a review concerned with institutional culture and accountability require three people with substantial senior-management/sector-governance backgrounds, including a former national representative of university employers and a former university Vice-Chancellor, but no person whose principal professional experience has been representing university employees or investigating institutional retaliation against them?

The committee does not contain a single, obvious independent voice whose career has been principally spent representing university employées.

In our view, the appointments of Laura Whyte and Cindy Butts could be excellent as part of a more balanced committee. In the absence that balance, the composition of this committee is completely unacceptable.